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Comment by zh3 | Hacker News Reader

Fortunately we moved off Fedora some time ago, for exactly this sort of reason - when you're working with industrial stuff where minimum timescale is a decade and reliability is a must, low-tech FB interfaces are de rigeur.

Once upon a time, breaking userspace was a no-no [0].

[0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

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This is a weird comment. Fedora is absolutely not intended for "industrial stuff where minimum timescale is a decade and reliability is a must" and if you were using it for that and had issues, it's kind of your own fault. This reads like a criticism of Fedora when it's not really deserved.

Yes, I should have said Redhat - apols. I assume that if this change is in Fedora then it'll go to RHEL.

It will go into RHEL, in a decade

More like 3 years, or maybe 6 if they skip it for the next one.

I don't think Linus would agree that "don't break userspace" applies to distributions choosing how to configure the Linux kernel. That's why the configuration options exist in the first place.

Why were you using a distro with a 9 month lifespan for 10+ year deployments?

I think Fedora is supported for ~13 month [0]. At least I have no issues updating every other release once a year.

[0] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/

I stand corrected, but the question doesn't change.

You're posting that email way, way out of context. I cringe whenever I see that linked. "Userspace" here refers to the kernel's policy about certain APIs. They won't change fbdev at this point but downstreams could always compile it out. It's also an extremely unprofessional email and Linus should have never sent it.

You can still use DRM/KMS to drive "low-tech FB interfaces" and it's actually better because you don't have to deal with the weirdness of the fbdev ioctls.

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